Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communication systems, and more particularly, to apparatus systems and methods for clustering network nodes.
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, broadcasts, and so on. Such networks, which are usually multiple access networks, support communications for multiple users by sharing the available network resources. One example of such a network is the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). The UTRAN is the radio access network (RAN) defined as a part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third generation (3G) mobile phone technology supported by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The UMTS, which is the successor to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technologies, currently supports various air interface standards, such as Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA), Time Division-Code Division Multiple Access (TD-CDMA), and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA). The UMTS also supports enhanced 3G data communications protocols, such as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), which provides higher data transfer speeds and capacity to associated UMTS networks. High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) is a data service offered on the uplink of UMTS networks.
In heterogeneous cellular wireless systems including base stations of widely varying power, base stations may be broadly categorized as “macro” cells or small cells. Femto cells and pico cells are examples of small cells. As used herein, a small cell means a cell characterized by having a transmit power substantially less than each macro cell in the network with the small cell, for example low-power access nodes such as defined in 3GPP Technical Report (T.R.) 36.932 V12.1.0, Section 4 (“Introduction”).
Wireless networks have seen increasing addition of small cells. Many small cells are deployed on an ad hoc basis and are interconnected with macrocells making up planned wireless infrastructure. Eventually, such trends may create a need for scalable, distributed control schemes to handle coordination with core networks, for example schemes using a hierarchy of control nodes including small cells. Such schemes may include clusters of small cells at least partly controlled by one of their members. Methods of clustering small cells presently rely on knowledge of network nodes and conditions over multiple clusters at a single control point. Because heterogeneous networks are unplanned, such knowledge may not be readily available. There is therefore a need to enable distributed clustering of wireless nodes without any need to centralize data collection over multiple clusters.